Abstract
Rebels have many ways to revolt. Rulers have only two ways to resist them: terror and restraint. Rulers either control the masses through fear—the way Machiavelli recommended in The Prince—or they use physical or symbolic restraints. Typically, rulers employ both kinds of restraints. Late modern strategies of restraints increasingly took an actuarial approach. Focusing on penology in the United States, Malcolm Feeley and Jonathan Simon (1992) identified a shift, beginning in the 1970s, away from what they called the old penology towards a new penology. The old penology concerned individual miscreants, measuring responsibility according to moral sensibilities: using diagnosis, intervention, and treatment of individual offenders. The new penology “is concerned with techniques to identify, classify, and manage groupings sorted by dangerousness. The task is managerial, not transformative. … It seeks to regulate levels of deviance …” (452). The new penology tends more toward the impersonal and bureaucratic, a sort of free market conception of crime control where regulatory techniques control the market in crime much as monetary regulation controls financial markets in the neoliberal economy. State bureaucracies, including but by no means limited to those overseeing criminal justice, prioritize the risks of betrayal and disloyalty, foreign invasion, and civil war (Simon 2001:22); or most pertinently, revolt.
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© 2010 Geoffrey R. Skoll
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Skoll, G.R. (2010). The Rebel. In: Social Theory of Fear. Palgrave Macmillan, New York. https://doi.org/10.1057/9780230112636_10
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1057/9780230112636_10
Publisher Name: Palgrave Macmillan, New York
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